Writer's block, an owner's guide: The Great Scottish Novel

A while back I told you about the study I made, in November, of 96 writers taking part in National Novel Writing Month 2005. I was interested in how they were motivated from day to day. I learned some interesting things that I’m still thinking about. Now may I tell you about the other research project I was running at the same time?

In this second project I took part in NaNoWriMo personally and I kept a journal of my own experience. Here’s how that went.

During the month, I wrote using my laptop computer in different parts of my home, at coffee shops, and at other locations. Usually I would open both the “novel” and “journal” files on the computer at the start of a writing session, and make journal entries as they occurred to me as well as at the start and finish.

After Novbember I left the journal on one side for a month. After that time most of it was unfamiliar. There were passages whose meaning I didn’t know.

I worked with the journal over the next five months, reading through it a total of seven or eight times, and I ended up with a chart of information from my day-by-day experiences.

Just a few of the things I learned from this:

1. I learned the value of freewriting and speedwrtiting. I generated many thousands of words by letting them flow more freely than I usually would. There were days when I typed 1,800 words in an hour, and I found that the writing was no worse than usual.

But sometimes the novel would stall because characters were talking around things without taking decisive action and without me making the effort to introduce stimulating plot developments. On Day 15 I wrote in my journal “it’s been a while since anything ever happened, so the responsibility is coming off them and going back on to me where it belongs”, after which I “tightened the screws a little”.

On the other hand some story events welled up from my subconscious that I wouldn’t have created if I’d been trying. Characterization also happened by itself as the story developed.

Losses of productivity

I repeatedly reduced my efforts just as things were going well. That was a pattern I’d corrected in other areas of my life but hadn’t noticed in my writing. So that was useful. For example on Days 12 thru 17 the journal shows me surprising myself again and again with my great productivity. Then on Days 18 and 19 I wrote nothing at all, and left myself thousands of words behind overall. On Day 20 I realized I was impossibly far behind with my novel, and I decided I had to change plan and treat the journal as part of the novel when I counted my productivity for the month.

Unproductive days; Quality of writing

Over the final five or six days of the month, I was taking less interest in the quality of my writing, and I noticed that this actually improved the quality. I also noticed that there were quite a few days when I did not write much but I felt good about it. I guess I have a tendency to rate quality above quantity even when working against the clock. I’m glad to have this information on matters of quality, because my other research didn’t address those at all.

Published on May 26, 2006 at 11:05 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/the-great-scottish-novel.html

1 Comment

“But sometimes the novel would stall because characters were talking around things without taking decisive action and without me making the effort to introduce stimulating plot developments.”

Like little wooden puppets, waiting for the puppetmaster, weren’t they? (We worry about people who hear voices, but it’s very disturbing - when you’re a writer - to have the voices refuse to talk.) I actually had to threaten one of my characters during NaNo in 2001. He got pouty, because I went from first person (his) to third person limited omniscient - and he lost his starring role. He just wouldn’t do anything for several days, until I started threatening to dress him up in his sister’s clothes, or have the school bully beat him to a pulp, or - egads, here’s the one that worked best - write him out entirely. Or make him an extraordinarily boring, minor character.

I can’t understand why people think writers are so odd, can you?

Comment by hollyjahangiri — October 24, 2006 @ 11:43 am

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